Ray Harryhausen:
The Early Years CollectionCommentary, Interview, and Review
by Lionel Ivan OrozcoJanuary 2005------------

Today's X, Y, and Z generations
weaned on desktops, laptops, cell phones, PDAs, Mp3s, DVDs, MTV, 500
channel satellite TV, etc. etc. .... may not recognize the name ofRay Harryhausenas a household
word, however, the motion picture industry which includes, directors,
producers, actors, entertainment news media, etc., and in particular, those
in the current special visual effects field, in which many are now working
in today's dominate use of CGI techniques (computer special effects &
animation), are well aware of him. Ray Harryhausen in the United States,
can perhaps be credited or greatly contributed to the commercial
use of the Stop Motion Animation technique in combination with his
innovative use of good ol' classic special effects processes, and made it
marketable as an entertainment package, presenting never
before seen, fantasy surreal-photoreal visual images to movie theater
audiences across the USA and worldwide. Many of the current artists &
technicians today doing computer CGI special effects and animation have had
some inspirational influence from the Master & Godfather,Ray
Harryhausen. Sometimes I have
said,"Before
CGI became cool.....Ray wasalreadyDoing It ! "

The very beginning use of the
Stop Motion Animation process is still in dispute and it possibly goes back
to, as early as 1905. Stop Motion had some of its in genesis, overseas in
Europe, where it was concurrently being explored. In the USA, another
visual effects pioneer,Willis
O'Brien, also experimented with Stop
Motion around 1915 period doing various projects and 18 years later in
1933, O'Brien's major efforts and contribution was realized in a
groundbreaking special effects epic, King Kong. That year, a young
boy at the age of 13, named Raymond Harryhausen, saw the premier of
King Kong at the Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood,
California. This one movie so strongly affected and mesmerized Ray and
served as the pivotal motivation that directed the course of his
future.

How many times have the press and media glamorized celebrities or public
figures of all sorts as though their success and fame happened easily or
quickly? Ray Harryhausen in the beginning had ups and downs and difficult
times trying to
market his unique brand of moving visual imagery creation. In Hollywood's
early days .... studio's seemed just as close-minded or very myopic and
could not see the potential of Ray's artistic & technical genius.
Fortunately, as an only child, young Ray was strongly encouraged by his
loving parents to pursue his dreams and both his dad & mom were also
gifted in craft & technical skills and helped Ray in producing his
early stop motion works. In Ray's day, there was virtually no information
about Stop Motion .... he struggled by himself and eventually through his
perceptive mind and detective work, he eventually figured out the details
of the Stop Motion photography process. How easy it is for all you now,
with today's overload of information, mass media, and internet
saturation.

Ray was a trailblazer ..... sweat,
dedication and perseverance in learning and refining his unique chosen
path. Keep in mind that Ray was not the actual “Director” of
his later, major feature films and he primarily served as the behind the
scenes creative hands-on artist/technician and many times credited as
producer. Nevertheless, the movie audiences identified these movies
asRay
Harryhausen Films.In the newly
released DVD set,Ray Harryhausen: The Early Years Collection, you will get to see Ray’s very early work and
experiments and see the progression in his creative skills
and talents before he became well known with his later major film
work.

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A few weeks ago, I had the
honor and pleasure in doing a phone interview withRay Harryhausen.A Stop Motion colleague of mine, Tom
Brierton also participated:

TB: Hi Ray! I have just seen The Early Years DVD
and I was really impressed. I was wondering how long was the DVD in
production and was The Tortoise and the Hare the impetus to
undertake this project?

RH: As you may already know, one of the fairy tales
included on the DVD was The Tortoise and the Hare. I started that
in the 1950’s and then had to abandon that tale due to a feature
project (It Came from Beneath the Sea), but some 50 years later in
2000 we undertook to complete T&H. It was a couple of fans,
Mark Caballero and Seamus Walsh who contacted me and said that they were
very much interested in finishing it. I lost the original script so rewrote
it and did some continuity designs and myself, Mark and Seamus modified it,
as needed.

LIO: Hi Ray, this is Lionel ! I was wondering, in The
Early Years DVD, there is a featurette about the making-of The
Tortoise and the Hare. It was mentioned that you actually animated
some new scenes? Nothing was mentioned about which shots you did, but could
you possibly reveal to us for the first time which scenes you animated in
T&H?

RH: It was a little hard to get back into it because the
last time I did any extensive animation was almost 25 years ago in The
Clash of the Titans. Yes, I did animate a few scenes in
T&H.

LIO: Looking at T&H, all the animation looked
seamless so I could not detect which shots you might have animated, however
in the making-of featurette, I could have gotten some clues which shots you
did!

RH: Well, don’t tell anyone, but what you saw on the
DVD might have been deceptive! Now everyone is going to start analyzing and
dissecting it!

LIO: Okay, I won't tell anyone!

TB: I was always impressed by the posing of your puppet
characters in your feature movie work and including your early years works
and shorts .... a dynamic quality. My question is ....Some animators prefer
to walk around the stage and act out the movements and then other animators
can see it in their mind’s eye. What is your process in preparing for
the animation?

RH: It is a little mixture of both. In the early days when
I started work on Mighty Joe Young, I use to have a canvas mat on
the floor and I would take a stop watch and go through the gestures I had
in mind, not to copy the movements but to get a rough idea, like how long
it would take your hand to go from point A to point B. After you start
getting experience though, you do not to need to use a stop watch as often
and you begin to get an intuitive sense of the timing, movements and
gestures.

LIO: In your Fairy Tales, I thought the animation of the
little girls and the female characters were imbued with very childlike and
feminine qualities. Did you act out the gestures and movements for these
characters?

RH: Well, much of it I had in my mind’s eye from
observation, however, I had a bit of experience by then and did not rely
too much by timing it with a stop watch. You know, you observe little
children, men and women .... how they pose while talking and listening to
each other. You remember those things.

TB: You devoted so much work in your Fairy Tale shorts. If
you had not gone into feature movie work, do you think you would have
continued with the shorts?

RH: I don’t know. My mother thought, I might have
gone into work as a commercial artist or something. I had to learn to draw
to put my ideas on paper but I do prefer to sculpt, as I have an affinity
for three dimensional things. I am just not sure what other work I possibly
would have gone into. Perhaps it was just that “fickle finger of
fate”. I did explore the possibility of going into television
commercial work and on the DVD you will see a commercial test &
examples. I did a test of dancing cigarette packs and individual dancing
cigarettes. Did you see that?

LIO: Yes I did! Something of your's that I have never seen
before. That was a great piece of detailed animation and creativity.

TB: I wanted to ask you about that cigarette commercial.
It has some outstanding animation. I was wondering what kind of rigging did
you use?

RH: I just used wires on a rig that allowed the
incremental adjustment of each wires and the rig was suspended above the
animation stage. Wires were attached to each of the cigarette packs and
also each cigarette as they popped out of the packs. A lot of movements to
keep track of and one has to keep everything in synchronization with the
music. It was just a test to show ad agencies. You will also, see on the
DVD, a few Lakewood commercials which was a real estate business
and Kenny Key was a puppet character talking to the camera about
new homes for sale.

LIO: Those Kenny Key commercials were
interesting. I never read anywhere before that you did those in your early
years.

RH: There were other Lakewood commercials in that
series that were similar and the one’s on the DVD were just some
examples. Like I said before, “the fickle finger of fate’ maybe
determined another direction for me to go into which was not TV commercial
work.

LIO: Well Ray, we are ever so glad that you did not go
into TV commercials because today there might not have been a Peter
Jackson, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Tim Burton and so on. When they
were young, all were inspired by your now classic feature film work.

RH:. Peter Jackson has said at times, that if he had not
seen our films including the original King Kong, he might not have
made The Lord of the Rings !

LIO: In your Little Red Riding Hood Tale, I never
saw it in its entirety and only previously seen brief clips of it in some
documentaries about you. I thought it looked spectacular in how bright
& crisp the colors were. It looked so good and one would think
Riding Hood was made recently!

RH: It was shot using Kodachrome film. All the fairy tales
were originally shot with this film stock but Little Red Riding
Hood was in much better condition than the other fairy tales. The film
archive department at The Academy of Motion Picture Arts &
Sciences made master negative preservation prints and did other
restorative processes of all my early works and that is what you will see
on the DVD.

LIO: In your early years, your mother and father helped
you greatly in your chosen direction?

RH: My father help me until he passed away. It was The
First Men in the Moon (1964) which was the last film that he assisted
me with the armatures for the selenite alien ants and the giant moon calf
caterpillar..

LIO: Do you recall the first time you handled an armature
or used one in a puppet?

RH: I started using armatures from almost the beginning.
The very early rough tests of the cave bear puppet had a wooden armature
and I got round beads from the five and dime store. The beads were held
together between pieces of wood strips. Of course, that crude armature
would ratchet and the movements would be jerky. Thereafter, my father began
helping me and the armatures were more refined due to his machining skills
and the use of much better materials and methods.

TB: Did your father have a machine shop?

RH: We had the usual equipment, lathe, drill press and
other metal working tools. He also worked as a machinist by trade.

LIO: In your early tests and fairy tales you used more
movement of the camera by animating it but you did not do much camera
moving or tracking shots in your feature film work?

RH: For my own early work, tests and fairy tales, I just
had more time and could afford to put in the extra labor to calibrate
complicated camera moves. I the feature film work we did, we had very tight
budgets and deadline schedules, so we had to use economical measures.

LIO: In King Midas fairy tale, I thought a great
shot was the King Midas & the Sprial Stairs scene in which the camera
is followiing & moving with King Midas as he descends down the stairs
into his cellar. Also, in Little Red Riding Hood, I was impressed
with the scenes of the wolf running through the forest towards
grandma’s house and we see the camera tracking and moving with the
wolf through the woods. Very dynamic.

RH: Well, good ....you liked it! The stair scene in
King Midas might be reminiscent of 7th Voyage of Sinbad.
I think, I could have had a yen for spiral stairs! Again, all that camera
movement takes extra time and work, and something we could not do with our
feature films.

RH: Do you do animation yourself?

LIO: I have done animation but got side-tracked and mostly
have been involved with the technical aspects of puppet construction. Right
now, I have a regular job to pay the bills and rent. From your book, I read
it was not so easy in your early days?

RH: It was difficult at times. Work in animation was not
frequent. Also, I had no books or easily accessible information and I just
had to figure things out and recreate how I thought it should be.

LIO: Today we have animation frame grabbers to assist with
the stop motion and we can instantly see the results. Have you used these
tools?

RH: Yes I did but I found it confusing. I don’t want
to know where I have been but want to know where I am going! I am use to
the old ways and I would wait until the next day for the rushes to see how
my animation looked. That was part of the excitement in the waiting and
anticipation to see if what I envisioned the animation in my mind and then
compare it to the final results, the following day.

LIO: Ray, do you use a computer at all?

RH: I do have one for letter writing and storage but I
don’t want to be hooked up to the internet as it can take up much of
one’s time!

LIO: To me, much of your fairy tales seems to have a
European quality. I know that you did work forGeorge
Pal. I was wondering in your early
days, were you aware of the practice of stop motion in Europe?

RH: That was my first professional job , working for
George Pal. In the beginning, I was not really aware of European stop
motion. It was only when I was 13 years old, when I first saw King
Kong, which was my first exposure to stop motion of just seeing it,
but I did not know how it was done. After about 6 months of just watching
King Kong, again and again, then a few years later, I finally
talked to people who worked on Kong and I found out about the
glories of stop motion, but no specific step by step details and I still
had to invent it because there was not information available to the public.
There were no books about it. I had to do a lot of calculating and
experimenting on my own.

TB: I tell you Ray, if it had not been for Forrey
Ackerman’s Famous Monsters magazine, which initially exposed
me to your work, I might not have become aware of stop motion until much
later.

RH: Compared to all the magazines and books today about
special effects, in my time, not many magazines were interested about
it.

LIO: Ray, you did some tests with rear 16mm rear
projection?

RH: I was experimenting with split screen in 16mm. For a
stop motion test, I did for my War of the Worlds concept of the
alien emerging from the spaceship, I wanted to do a traveling matte
composite of people in front of the alien but it was going to be too
complicated and I couldn’t do it.

LIO: In your Baron Munchausen test, you did a
rear projection in 16mm. Did you use a special projector?

RH: It was just a little tinny 16mm projector I picked up
somewhere and only did some minor modification and made it so it could go a
frame at a time.

TB: Ray, so are you planning on coming out of
retirement?

RH: Not if I can help it! I retired from making films
almost 25 years ago. I do many other things. Sometimes I get involve with
feature films. I have gotten several as an advisor working on scripts and
such, but I won’t go into the details at this time.

TB: So you do not think you would get back in doing short
films?

RH: No, I don’t think I could. I don’t want to
get hooked again with doing actual animation. It can take too much of your
life! I don’t know if anyone has ever counted the many hundred
thousands & thousands of frames I animated!

LIO: I don’t think you will never lose your
animation skills!

RH: It would all come back, like learning to ride a
bicycle. You never forget. You know .... everything you see in all our
films, is usually the first take. We never had the time and money to do
retakes. I would say 90 to 95% were first takes, in every film I worked
on.

TB: I remember when I was young seeing Jason and the
Argonauts. Shortly thereafter, I bought a model skeleton in a store
and used it to do stop motion tests of my skeleton coming out of the
ground. Just shows you how all of us are impacted and influenced by your
work!

RH: The snowball rolls on. Willis O’Brien was
inspired by certain people, and I was motivated by Cooper’s and
O’Brien’s work .... then many at Industrial Light &
Magic, Peter Jackson and others were inspired by my work. Peter
Jackson may now inspire others. So the snowball gets bigger and
bigger.

LIO: Ray, what do you think about CGI?

RH: Well it’s a dream to think that just because CGI
came in, that everything else should be discarded. It’s
disappointing how that is suggested by some. There should be
room for every technique depending on the type of story. CGI is a good
creative tool but should not completely replace other methods.

LIO: I very much agree with you on that Ray!
Fortunately, there now seems to be some brief comeback of stop motion
animation. Are you aware of Tim Burton’s The Corpse
Bride?

RH: Oh yes. I did visit the studio in England where they
are shooting The Corpse Bride. They are doing some amazing work
and the puppets are remarkable! There is also Aardman Studio and I
am friends with Nick Park and Peter Lord. They say, how our films have
inspired them. I am grateful that our films have had such a positive
influence.

TB: I teach stop motion at a college in Chicago. Often
times the class gets so filled up and we have to add extra sessions. The
students just love stop motion because it’s so hands-on. I show them
examples of your work and stop motion examples from others and they just
eat it up! I recently showed students your new Early Years DVD and
they were impressed.

RH: Hopefully, they will all get the Early
Collections DVDs because it shows how you can develop on your own and
that you really do not need a big crew to do Stop Motion.
It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, though, but perhaps there are
enough people that admire the technique .... the creative things that go
into it and they will appreciate it and inspire another generation.

LIO: Ray, thanks for taking the time to do this interview.
You can be sure that I will always be out there, everywhere and on the
internet, promoting and advocating for Stop Motion to help keep it in the
public eye.

TB: Same goes here ..... thanks Ray and a pleasure to talk
with you.

RH: Your welcome and thank you .....and be sure to spread
the word about our new Early Years DVD!

Ray Harryhausen, mild manner in
his personality, a gentleman and low-key but I am sure, he was very much, a
focused technical & creative wizard when applying his art, craft, and
skills. Ray’s last film was Clash of the Titans (1981). He
put his entire energies into these movie projects and each one can last a
number of years. I know, many would have wanted Ray to continue, but
hewas smart and saw the trend of motion pictures
and the eventual saturation of the movie mainstream market with an even
more corporate mentality where every film’s creative decision or
direction is dictated by committee and audience demographic
charts. It has always been like this, but much more magnified, fierce,
and intense .... a market that seems to be producing formulaic &
homogenized products for the masses. Also, hundreds of movie crew staff
seem the norm in today’s film. Look at the end credits of current
movies. Ray had a minimal staff and very small budgets for his projects but
made up for it with pure resourcefulness, good storyline, and much
creativity and produced a miracle on the screen! One can sense the
artistic hands-on sweat equity he put into his films. Ray has been polite
and commented about current computer animation and hi-tech special effects
in which he does appreciate it as "another tool" to present visual imagery
but he also has emphatically said many times, that one should not
discard other visual styles or aesthetics in presenting good stories.
In the end, the general movie going audiences does not really care what
techniques are used but judge the films on their overall entertainment
value. His heart and soul will always remain with Stop Motion!Thanks
Ray!You very much deserve all
the respect & recognition. In 1992 Ray received theGordon E. Sawyer Academy Award, and in 2003 he was presented with aStar on The Hollywood Walk of
Fame.

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DVD Review:
You will get a deep appreciation and history of Ray’s beginning
work which eventually later in his career, his techniques and artistry
evolved to a high degree of finesse & polish and became his trademark
brand of classic special effects which has inspired and influenced so many
of today’s top people in the motion picture business .....Peter
Jackson, Tim Burton, NIck Park, James Cameron, Steven Speilberg, George
Lucas, Joe Dante, John Landis, and also a plethora of technicians,
artists, craftspeople, modelmakers, prosthetic FX makeup people, CGI
people, all working in the special visual effects field.Ray Harryhausen: The Early Years Collectioncovers the years 1936-54 (2 Dvd set, total 223 minutes).
Prior to this Dvd release, in the past I have only seen brief clips of
Ray's early work and some I have never seen, but now you will finally be
able to view them all in their full glory and restored for posterity by
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Science's Film Archive
Dept..The Early Years Collection DVDs will greatly
compliment Ray’s book,Ray Harryhausen: An Animated Life. Here are the detailed contents of the DVDs which speaks for
itself: